Asus g750JX vs retina Macbook pro

Hey guys,

Need an advice here, I have the option to get either g750jx or a macbook pro retina 15" base model (2.4gz, 8gm ram, 650M gpu, 256ssd) for college (software engineering if it matters). What are you pro/cons of the asus and which one would you chose is price wasn't an issue. Thanks.

I honestly couldn't think of two laptops that are further apart in terms of function. The macbook is an extremely expensive and portable multimedia machine with OSX, slightly obsolete components and pretty poor SSD storage that costs a hilarious amount of money to upgrade through Apple. It will be great for software engineering though, especially if you need to carry it around all the time.

The G750 is over twice as heavy but over twice as powerful from a graphics point of view, has dual hard drive bays, twice the ram, a numpad and windows 8. It is almost surely going to be a lot cheaper as well. Obviously the screen won't be nearly as good unless you go for the 120hz screen which is much better than the standard one. It's a desktop replacement and as such isn't intended to be carried through classes all the time.

The G750 is a gaming laptop, the macbook isn't. Do you care about playing at ultra settings or can you settle with medium?

I just purchased the G750JX for AutoCAD and wished I had gone with the Retina MacBook Pro. After the $1500 for the laptop, another $500 for the SSD, and another $300 to max out the RAM I could've had the MacBook Pro I was looking at. With the problems of it running at .77Ghz while off the charger it is almost unusable. If the BIOS was fixed on the JX version my answer might be different, but right now without knowing when it will be fixed I wish I would have gone with the Mac.

As to gaming in college, I'd recommend you don't. Better to focus on classes than leader boards.

I would recommend the ASUS, the cooling is better, the performance is better, the OS is better (I hate OS X with a passion - it's totally non-intuitive). Also, if you are in software engineering, you'll end up doing a lot in LINUX, so having a Mac is just inconvenient.

Also, the other thing to consider is one of ASUS' other laptops. They have a nice 15" system with 1080p (which you absolutely have to have), 8 GB of RAM, and a quad-core processor for about $800. With the money you save over the Mac, you could build a really powerful desktop if you wanted something to game on. You can always get a cheaper 13" laptop for carrying around (ASUS has several) and use a desktop in your house/dorm.

You mentioned you're taking software engineering courses. Why would you even consider using a Mac for that is entirely beyond me heh. Like Zygo said 80% of the things you'll be doing will be *nix based and the rest will be windows based. Why would you ever consider having to jump through hoops to engineer software in VMs on subpar performing hardware?

I'm far from an expert on ASUS laptops (I don't own one) but I can tell you from a software engineering perspective you want a PC. Period. An as fast one as you can get (you'll see what I'm talking about when you start compiling library dependencies...2 hours to compile boost for example is not funny at all). You can run Linux, BSD, Windows and yes even OSX (if you ever need to) on it natively or in VMs (with better performance than a Mac would ever achieve on virtualization). It's better performing, cheaper, cheaper to upgrade, has more upgrade options and is generally your only real option here. Just choose a powerful laptop.